


howling "do you believe?" (of the wild ones remix)

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen, VENGEANCE ROAD TRIP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 11:35:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3409073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helena explains: the only way to hurt the people who made them this way, hurt them the way the two of them have been hurt, is to get rid of them. Burn them to the ground. And they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, amen. Because Helena knows. Helena knows what it’s like to be angry, and Helena knows sometimes the only way to stop being angry and start being happy is to break the thing that made you angry into little tiny pieces.</p>
<p>Helena knows: Rachel is angry. This will be enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	howling "do you believe?" (of the wild ones remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [tigers in the moonlight running](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3335084) by [piggy09](https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09). 



> [warnings: violence, incest overtones, abuse, nudity & negative body image, mentions of sadism, torture mentions]
> 
> Was this a necessary remix? Probably not. But you don't understand how desperately head-over-heels in love I am with this concept and these two broken human beings.

1.

Helena presses the rot-sweet cloth over Rachel’s mouth, thinks about Grace, thinks _shh, shh, shh._ Rachel, in Helena’s arms, is all bones and sadness. She is lighter than Helena is. She is weaker.

Rachel falls to the ground like deadweight and Helena looks at her, broken like bones on the ground. In her heart, something rolls over and over and over again – when Helena prods it with her tongue it tastes like pity, sharp and sweet and sour. Poor sad little Rachel, a pile of snapped sticks with no one to care.

She’s lucky Helena’s here to help her.

Helena drags Rachel all the way to a hotel room, Rachel’s head lolling against Helena’s neck, and explains: the only way to hurt the people who made them this way, hurt them the way the two of them have been hurt, is to get rid of them. Burn them to the ground. And they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, amen. Helena has supplies: a sniper rifle, some knives, money, food. She needs Rachel to tell her who to turn that rifle on.

Rachel looks at Helena like Helena is the stupidest thing alive and Helena whispers, “You are not angry, _yahnya?_ ” Because Helena knows. Helena knows what it’s like to be angry, and Helena knows sometimes the only way to stop being angry and start being happy is to break the thing that made you angry into little tiny pieces.

Helena knows: Rachel is angry. This will be enough.

5.

The first time Rachel kills someone, Helena finds out from the buzz-buzzing of the phone in her pocket. It is a text that says _Cleanup rqrd asap_ and then hurried, sharp short directions to a room of the facility. Helena is a long way away, picking off security guards and luring them away from the basement where Rachel should be smashing vials into nothing but a pretty explosion of glass. It seemed easy enough. It seemed like something she could do.

Helena goes down to the basement, hood pulled over her head to hide Sarah’s face, and sees a man on the ground. There is blood _everywhere_ , and a stab wound in his neck. _Well._ Helena feels proud, maybe, looking down at the body. She feels a lot of things. She feels very little. She cleans up the body, thinks: for some reason, she’d thought this would be different. Not that there wouldn’t be bodies, but – in her head, no one had faces, and they did not scream when they died. Like killing people for her family would be different.

(Killing the man in Rachel’s apartment was different _enough_ that she’d thought—)

But it doesn’t matter, not really. She didn’t have to kill anyone. She just has to clean it up, blood fading away on paper towels she stuffs in her bag. She’ll go to a woman’s restroom later and shove them in the little metal bins; no one will look. Things like this come easy to Helena. Maybe too easy.

But it’s alright, this is what she was made for. She locks the body in a cabinet, hops up onto a desk, swings her feet back and forth and waits. Rachel killed someone! That means, no matter how much she says nasty things about them being different, they are at least a little bit the same. Helena likes stabbing in the neck too. It’s a good place. They are the same, and this could work, and they aren’t a _family_ but maybe—

Rachel comes in through the other door, shaking and smelling like apple juice. She looks at the room, and then looks at Helena. Helena grins at her.

“You killed him!” she says happily, because this was a good thing that Rachel did and she should not look so _off_. “Did you _like_ it?”

“Did you,” Rachel snaps, and for a second Helena doesn’t know what to say.

0.

The first time Helena killed someone, she screamed. “She” could be Helena or the woman she killed. It doesn’t really matter. They were the same anyways.

8.

She leaves Rachel with the senator – he’s starting to howl, now, low angry sounds, like Helena in a cage – and wanders through his house, pocketing jewelry with gloved hands. It’s difficult to watch him hurting, when she’s not angry with him. She was mean to Henrik, and to Olivier, but that was different; Henrik had hurt her, Olivier had put a black bag over Sarah’s head, it was righteous and God would have—

Anyways. This man does something with contracts, and Rachel had said _we need him_ with a voice fraying at the edges, so here they are – Helena’s lockpick in the door, Rachel’s knife at the man’s throat.

Rachel’s knife at the man’s throat. Hm. Helena was mean to Henrik, and to Olivier, but not in the way that lasts, not with scars. She was _so_ angry. And this was what she wanted! For Rachel to be angry, for Rachel to have enough anger to go after the people who made her and unmake them. That way Rachel could remake _herself_ , the way Helena did. Helena should be proud, maybe, looking at all these bodies. But she’s starting to get the feeling that this wasn’t how it was supposed to go, that she made a mistake somewhere. ( _All you do is make mistakes,_ Maggie breathes. _You are dead_ , Helena reminds her, but that never stopped Helena so she isn’t expecting much.)

Helena likes, sometimes, hurting people, likes the way violence makes sense, likes hitting and hitting and hitting until whatever feeling is hurting her goes away. But she doesn’t – she never sat down with a knife and kept going, for _hours_. She never went that cold. She’s starting to think that hurting people is making Rachel _more_ cold, which wasn’t ever what she wanted. But maybe this will get Rachel information, and she will be happy. That would be good. After this they can buy food, and that will be better – that will make _Helena_ happy, at least.

Somewhere across the house there’s a loud scream. In the senator’s living room there are several family portraits, the senator and his wife and small children and their dog. Helena traces the tip of a finger along the senator’s face. Maybe tonight she’ll order cake.

7.

Eventually the time comes to teach Rachel to use a gun. Helena takes her to a gun range, which is not where _she_ learned to use a gun (Maggie’s breath stinks like rice wine on the back of her neck hissing _kill the abomination you are the abomination kill the abomination_ and Helena clenches her hands very tightly, thinks about how Kira smelled when Helena buried her nose in her shoulder: like hope, and dawn, and the color pink), but Rachel has more to learn and her hands have to relearn how to grow calluses. Her hands are so soft.

Helena whistles when she gets them guns, because she knows Rachel doesn’t like it. She can’t help it! It is just so _easy_. Besides, it helps her feel things as she loads the gun, checks it, feels her body remembering how to be a machine again. Turns and fires. One, two, three, four, five, six. The shots form a halo around the brain, and Helena thinks _amen_ with a raw, hollow sort of weight. Sometimes she is very tired.

Rachel is bad at it. Rachel is bad at a lot of things that are not sitting in a pretty glass office and making phone calls to people who can do things for her. Helena thinks about Sarah, again, when she watches Rachel fumble with the cartridge, watches Rachel get angry and angrier for being angry. She thinks about teaching Sarah to use a gun, and how badly Helena wants to teach Sarah how to do things.

Rachel is not Sarah, though. Rachel says this very loudly and all the time.

Still, Helena pushes Rachel’s arm until it’s pointing right, murmurs things about focusing on the target and ( _imagine them_ , Tomas says, _they will be screaming, they will be terrified at the arrival of their swift vengeance, you must not waver_ , and Helena is sixteen years old and her hands don’t shake) closes her eyes tight, feels the press of Rachel’s body tucked against hers like an extension of herself. Like another her.

The air smells like gunpowder and winter and the soap from the last hotel they were at. The gun goes off. Helena opens her eyes, and sees that Rachel has shot her target right in the heart.

9.

_Sister sister drop the gun_ Helena screams but Sarah’s mouth is rolling with the words _go to hell I’ve already got a family abomination abomination godless abomination not-sister penance my t-shirt_ and the gun goes off and Helena wakes up, one sharp jolt, like being punched in a stab wound. She slips a hand under the shirt she is wearing as pajamas to feel along the knotted edges of the scar opposite her heart. Still there. No bullet.

Across the hotel room Rachel is a black shape on the other bed, sitting up and looking out the window. Outside cars are speeding by, off to their homes and families, and their lights make Rachel’s face blink in and out of the dark. She looks angry again. Helena lies there and watches her for a little bit, because it’s comforting. Rachel is very angry all the time. Helena is just tired, and she wants to go home.

(Helena is just lonely, and she wants to go home.)

“Nightmares,” she asks, because they are both awake now – Rachel is sitting up in bed and sweat is cooling on Helena’s skin, stinging in her wings. She wants to remember that something is real. She doesn’t want to be alone, in this strange space between light and dark.

“What is it like to have a sister,” Rachel says, sounding frustrated by it. Oh. Oh, Helena was not expecting that. For a heartbeat (a heartbeat her heartbeat her heart beats oh Sarah) Helena thinks about the question. What is it _like_ , to have a sister? It is like having a bullet in your chest. It is like loving someone, and having that someone put a bullet in your chest. It is like the space where a bullet should be but where it isn’t, anymore, no matter how much sometimes you want it to be there.

It is, she thinks, like being hungry.

6.

The two of them draw straws to see who will have to take the long way back to their new hotel room, in their new city – Rachel thinks Helena is stupid, but Helena knows better than Rachel does the stupid ( _imbecilic, childish_ , Tomas hisses, each word punctuated with a slap across the face) risk of having her face seen. When Rachel explained it to her the first time Helena nodded along, shut her ears off and tried to find pieces of Sarah in Rachel’s face. Not her face. But Sarah’s face. It wasn’t easy, but there was something around the eyes that made Helena’s backwards heart ache in her chest.

She’s remembering that now, actually – she drew the short straw, has to dawdle. She’s rubbing the quarters she found in someone else’s pocket back and forth between her finger and thumb, the sound of the metal chirping to itself something like a secret. She’d seen a telephone booth on their way in and had said nothing, but here she is: keeping secrets, stealing money from dead men’s pockets. She remembers the way back to the booth – she always remembers the way back – and still has a hood over her head and her head tucked down when she ducks inside. With the door closed, it is small, (like a cage,) and Helena can see old graffiti scrawled across the walls. She shifts from foot to foot. This is a mistake – she could lead people to their lo-ca-tion, she could ruin things.

But she still remembers the number. After Sarah called her in Elizabeth Childs’ apartment, Helena punched S-a-r-a-h into her phone; after Helena rescued Sarah from Olivier’s basement she huddled in the ship – wearing Sarah’s jacket, Sarah’s jacket that smelled like Sarah – and counted the numbers to herself, all seven of them the most precious numbers she’d ever known. She’ll remember them forever, just like she’ll remember how Sarah’s jacket smelled, the gasp of “ _Sarah_ , my name is Sarah” from inside the black bag, how Sarah’s arms felt wrapped around her, _Sarah._

There’s a dial tone in her ear and Helena realizes she’s slid in the quarters already, dialed the number. Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Hello?” Sarah asks, sounding wary and surprised, and Helena starts crying just like that. _I miss you_ , she mouths into the phone. _I am making the world safe for you. I love you. You’re my sister, and I love you._ She covers the mouthpiece with her hand so none of her words get out, so Sarah won’t hear her crying.

“Hello?” Sarah asks again. “Hello? Hello?”

11.

Most nights, she wakes up screaming. She’s accepted it, knows how to make herself come back to herself with traced fingers over scars and whispers of what might be prayers: _no, that’s not true, you saved my life, you’re my sister, amen_. Those she knows how to deal with.

Tonight she wakes up with the sound of a scream ringing in her ears, but – her mouth is closed, her throat is not sore at all. She sits up in her hotel bed, looks across the room, sees Rachel thrashing back and forth like the animal one or both of them is trying not to be. Before Helena can think she’s crossed the room, hopped into Rachel’s bed and closed her hands around Rachel’s wrists to keep her hands from flying into the air like frightened birds.

“Rachel,” she says, low, “Wake up. It is alright.”

Rachel wakes up slow, still trapped in some dream of – well, Helena doesn’t know what Rachel dreams about. It is the Rachel-version of guns, probably. Rachel’s eyes find Helena’s, wide and afraid, and her wrists go limp under Helena’s hands.

“It’s alright,” Helena hums, “I am here. Shh, shh, shh.”

Rachel’s eyes go even wider, for a moment, and then they are just angry. She’s bucking at Helena’s weight like it is a trap and she wants _out_ , hissing, “ _Don’t_ ” with an angry wounded fear.

“Don’t _touch_ me,” Rachel croons, a frightened sing-song. She’s shaking. Helena lets her wrists go, shuffles to the edge of the bed to go back to her own.

“Wait—” Rachel says, and then stops. Neither of them move.

“Do you want me to come back,” Helena whispers, and Rachel makes an angry sound. Helena turns to look at her, sees that she still hasn’t moved; she’s staring up at the ceiling, eyes the only bright things in the dark.

“I don’t know _what_ I want,” she whispers, and she sounds miserable. The moment feels very fragile. Helena can taste on her tongue that anything she says, Rachel would believe: _You want to make a family with me_ , or _you don’t._ She doesn’t understand why everyone is so eager to break people like them and remake them; the idea of having this much power over Rachel is dizzying, and it makes Helena very tired. She doesn’t _want_ to decide what Rachel wants. She just wants them all to be happy, mostly. She just wants them all to stop getting hurt.

“I want to be with Sarah,” Helena says quietly. The words taste like lipstick on her tongue, waxy and not-quite-right.

“Of course you do,” Rachel says back, sounding amused, sounding angry, sounding tired. “You’ve always known what you wanted.”

“No,” Helena murmurs. She doesn’t know how to explain: she’s spent her whole life only wanting what other people have told her to want. Sarah is the only thing she’s ever wanted on her own, besides little things like flowers and crayons and sugar packets.

Maybe that’s what Rachel means. If you turned out the insides of Rachel’s pockets they would be empty, except for the knife Helena gave her. The juicebox Helena gave her. The purpose Helena gave her.

Oh.

“You don’t have to know, _yahnya_ ,” Helena says. “Maybe you just want to know what you want.”

There’s silence from the bed, and Helena decides to pretend that Rachel has fallen back asleep. Helena decides to pretend that she has fallen asleep, too; she keeps her back to Rachel, curls up in the empty space in Rachel’s bed and waits for sleep to come.

When it does, her dreams are blank and shiny and smooth, like a building made entirely of glass, only reflecting what’s placed right in front of it. Never coming up with an image of its own.

She wakes up lonely and cold, her throat silent. The bed next to her is empty; Rachel is gone.

3.

She tries to hug Rachel, once.

4.

Helena moves in a strange sort of orbit around the drugstore, always always keeping her back to the cameras. She can feel their machine-gaze on her skin; she’s named the one by the counter _Maggie_ and the one in the back _Tomas_ , because it felt right. Maggie is on her side of the store, and Tomas is on Rachel’s side. They shouldn’t be here together, maybe! But Helena wouldn’t stay in the car for _Sarah_ , so she definitely wouldn’t for Rachel. Rachel is not Sarah. So. In the basket go packets of beef jerky, oversized shirts with city names written in cheery neon letters, a cheap kitchen knife that won’t hold up to a large amount of force. Basket, basket, basket. She wanders through the aisles, stops in the aisle for makeup; she can see her face reflected in the tiny mirrors on the tops of the shelves, little splintered pieces of Helena. An eye. Her lips, gnawed-on and peeling. The skin of her face with all its color sucked out by the hungry lights.

Her lips vanish in the mirror when she sucks them between her teeth. She pulls them back out, crouches in front of the mirror and mouths, _you saved my life. You’re my sister. I love you._ But the words are still Helena’s words, the lips still Helena’s lips. Angry now, she grabs a tube of lipstick from the shelf – red red red,

(neat on the thin line of Maggie’s lips, she is going to a rich-place again and she smells like perfume – things that real people wear when they are doing real people things, working and shopping. Helena’s fingers itch to grab the tube out of Maggie’s hand and smear it on her own lips, like it would make her a real person. But she doesn’t need to be a real person, because she is more real than real. Besides Maggie would be angry. So Helena watches Maggie from under the curve of her eyelashes, soft like feathers, watches Maggie pull on stockings and high-heeled shoes. She looks so pretty. She smells like a mother would.

Then Maggie turns to look at Helena, and she is just Maggie again, the fist and the harsh word. “Don’t wander,” she snaps, and when Helena looks at her in confusion – wan-der – she rolls her eyes, says, “ _ne ydut_.” When Helena doesn’t move fast enough Maggie grabs her by the ends of her hair, brown and greasy between the fingers of her fist, and hisses, “If I come back and you are gone you will be punished _. Zrozumity?_ ”

Yes, Helena understands. She nods, quick like she’s supposed to, and Maggie’s hands leave, and Maggie leaves. Helena curls up on her side and puts her thumb between her teeth, sucks on it and mutters around that flesh, “ _Ne ydut. Ne ydut. Ne ydut_.” She pretends that the words don’t come from Maggie, but from someone who wants Helena to stay.

She pretends, in the world, that there is someone who wants Helena to)

(run the lipstick tube neat along her lips. There. Now she and the doll match. Helena’s lips feel strange with the lipstick on them, and there is a small voice in the back of her head – a voice that hid there a while ago, back when Helena’s hair was still brown – that whispers, _would Sarah like you more with your lips all red, would Sarah like you more if you were a real human being?_ But she _is_ real. She is real, and Sarah is real, and Rachel is real – apparently – moving back and forth like a movie character in the window far far below. Helena kisses the doll, pokes her tongue out to taste its cold plastic lips, the red of the lipstick. _So_ red. So fake, on Helena’s tongue.

She lifts the binoculars, puts them to her eyes, sees: Rachel. High heels and shiny hair. Helena saw Rachel putting on perfume through the binoculars, wonders if she smells like mothers do. She looks pretty. She looks prettier than Helena did when Helena was in Rachel’s apartment, back when Helena was covered in blood, back when Helena came running after Sarah.

Sarah did not look for Helena, but Sarah went to Rachel’s apartment. Sarah only comes running after Helena if she thinks Helena is going to hurt someone. Sarah only let Helena into her apartment because she hurt someone. Sarah made Felix give Helena his clothes, but did not want to see how Helena looked in them, ran away as soon as she could.

Helena is sitting up here in this building, taking more time than she should to kill Rachel, because she wants Sarah to come running after her. Because this is the _only way_ to have Sarah notice her.

Would Sarah like her more, if she was)

red like a lie, red like blood – twists it open, presses it hard against the mirror and lets the familiar shapes scrawl themselves onto the glass. Helena first. Then Sarah. Then Kira. All of them holding hands, a family, _yes_.

There’s room left, so Helena draws Rachel too: not holding hands with anyone, but the slippery lipstick makes her arm too long. So she is reaching. She looks in the mirror next to her – no, wait, it’s at the wrong angle. She tilts it and _then_ looks, sees a tiny Rachel orbiting on the other side of the store. She doesn’t look like the woman in Helena’s binoculars. Not with her hair cut short, like Helena’s. (And Rachel cut it herself, in the bathroom of a hotel, the shining scissorblades so close to Helena’s skin. Helena cut Rachel’s hair, and Rachel cut Helena’s, and that makes them—) She doesn’t look like the other Rachel at all. Mostly she just looks lonely.

Helena draws another family in that mirror to keep Rachel company, Helena-and-Sarah-and-Kira. There, she thinks. Now nobody has to be alone.

0.

She realizes what she has to do in the middle of the night, when everyone except her is asleep – on couches, in the bed, their breathing slow and steady like people who do not get nightmares. Helena has to _keep_ them from getting nightmares. From the den she’s made behind Felix’s easels she sits up, and thinks about it. Helena has nightmares. Helena has rough spots on her hand, from holding a rifle and a pistol and a knife. Helena is very good at holding a rifle and a pistol and a knife.

Helena is very good at starting fires.

She looks at the dark spot of the apartment that is Sarah, asleep in the dark. What she wouldn’t do to keep Sarah safe. (The answer is little enough to frighten her, dark like a hole, like standing on the edge of a cliff and looking all the way to the bottom.) She wants to keep Sarah safe, so this is what she will do: she will destroy everyone who could hurt Sarah, anyone who helped make Sarah this way.

(This isn’t for Helena. It is too late for Helena, anyways.)

She pushes her bottom lip back and forth with her fingers, thinks about it; she could be a gun again, but she would need somewhere to point and she would need someone to shoot.

Then she remembers Rachel, who had sent Felix to jail with a snap of her shiny figures. Rachel made Sarah’s voice tremble on the phone. Rachel moved Paul around her apartment like an object.

Someone must have made Rachel like that. Someone must have made Rachel angry, too, just like Helena.

It took a long time, and Sarah yelling at her, but Helena realized that she had been made-this-way and then Helena got angry. She will just have to tell Rachel she was made-like-that and then Rachel will get angry and then she will help Helena, with her brain full of spiderwebs and her fingers tied up with puppet strings. She will point and Helena will shoot, and it will be easy. And then Rachel – just like Helena! – will learn to stop hurting people, sending Helena’s sister’s brother to jail, trying to eat Sarah up with her prison-jaws. And then Rachel can be happy too, maybe. Helena can be happy. Sarah can be happy. It is a good plan, she thinks.

Helena stands up, mind made up just as quickly as it was the last time she left Sarah in the dark. She should say goodbye, but she doesn’t think Sarah will understand. It’s best if she comes back to Sarah later, with the whole world robbed of sharp things, and says _I am sorry that I left, but it was better like this_.

After this, Helena thinks, she will come home. She will be a part of a family.

Sarah will forgive her. Sarah will forgive her. Sarah will forgive her. Helena opens the door.

10.

It’s not raining outside, but Helena has an umbrella up _anyways_ because it is too warm for hooded jackets but they can’t let their faces show on cameras. That is _bad_. She and Rachel are walking next to each other through another shiny hallway, and Helena is holding an umbrella, twirling it back and forth.

In her other hand, she is holding Rachel’s hand. They are almost the same hand now, with Rachel’s hand rough from holding a gun. Rachel’s fingernails had polish on them, for a while, but there was one day where she sat in the bathroom scraping it off with her nails and glared at Helena when Helena wandered into the bathroom. When she left Helena came back in anyways, pressed her fingertip to the sink drain to get tiny pieces of silver on her fingernail. Little stars.

Now Rachel’s hands are plain and rough and one of her hands is wrapped around Helena’s, sending a warm sun shining in Helena’s chest. She likes this better than anything else, she thinks – likes touching someone else, likes remembering that other people are alive and willing to hold her hand. Even if they deny it. Even if they like to pretend that Helena is ( _useless,_ slurs Maggie, _a waste of all this time and effort, only a frightened child_ ) ( _no better than they are_ , Tomas whispers against the bars of the cage) ( _nothing to me, nothing to me, nothing to me, nothing to me, nothing to me, nothing to me, nothing to me_ ) bothering them.

It’s strange, because Helena hadn’t left Sarah to find a family; she’d left to hurt other people, because she’d thought that was what she was good at. But now that she’s burning all those people playing at God, she’s realizing that this wasn’t really ever what she wanted. She just wanted to make a family.

But she’ll keep doing it, because it will make her family safe. She squeezes Rachel’s hand – Rachel said she didn’t want to be a part of a family, said that Helena was just saying what _Helena_ wanted, said that Helena didn’t know what Rachel wanted at all. But Rachel doesn’t know what Rachel wants either, and: here she is holding Helena’s hand.

After this, Helena thinks firmly. After this, it will all be alright. She twirls the umbrella, and they keep walking.

13.

The last time Helena sees Rachel, it’s only her back, smaller and smaller as she leaves Helena behind. She is just the same as when Helena found her: a pile of snapped sticks. Except she’s _not_ the same, because there are people who could care about her – but Rachel won’t let them, and after all this time Helena still can’t quite understand why.  

Helena watches Rachel’s shoulderblades, the way they are sharp like knives, keeps her eyes on them as Rachel walks away.

2.

Rachel has a list of people to burn that she keeps folded up, tucked in her pocket or down her shirt; when they are done, she will pull it out, cross out the latest name with the slow steady movement of a pen.

Today they’re in a park – it’s spring, and the air is fresh and clean on Helena’s tongue, and somewhere out there a man who would have hurt other people is dead, Helena’s sniper bullet right between the eyes. _Bang._ Soon she’ll be coming home to Sarah, and there is an ice cream truck ringing along the street, another name crossed out on the list and Helena is _happy_ , soaring in her chest.

There’s a sound of crumpling paper as Rachel puts the note back, and Helena turns to look at her, in the light and shadow of a tree. Rachel looks at her like she is something disgusting, which makes Helena upset. Today is such a good day! Soon they can go home, to their lives.

“Aren’t you happy?” Helena asks. “Look, _yahnya_ , one step closer.”

“Do _not_ call me that,” Rachel snaps, (and Sarah ignores her, wraps her arm around Helena’s shoulder, pulls her close – Helena was lying, wants the sound on Sarah’s tongue, enough to show that Helena matters to her, a name for a name, a name that means _you matter to me_ , meathead meathead meathead) “and no. This is business. Nothing more.”

She stands up and walks away, and Helena watches her move through the crowd. Around Rachel the world is alive, but Rachel doesn’t really seem to see it. She just keeps moving forward, forward, forward.

Helena sighs, hops off the park bench, and follows Rachel as she leaves.

12.

Eventually, Rachel stops needing Helena at all. She will tell Helena to go away and her hand will get very tight around her knife and Helena will leave, wander in ghost-circles around the building or the basement or wherever they are while Rachel kills people, or starts fires. Helena’s hands are softening, and Rachel’s scratch when Helena is able to fumble them against her own. She was right, she thinks: this wasn’t the way to do it. This didn’t fix anything, didn’t make Rachel happy.

(Or maybe it made Rachel _too_ happy. Helena doesn’t know which is worse.)

All it did was make Helena realize that this wasn’t her: she is no longer the person who only knows how to kill. This wasn’t what she needed to do to make things right. That’s fine! She knows what will fix her. Sarah will fix her. Helena believes the same thing she always has: after this, she will go home and be with Sarah, and everything will be alright.

Sometimes Helena wants to hold Rachel down and force the words into her mouth, _family, sister_ ; sometimes Helena wants to unmake what she’s done and remake Rachel into the person Helena has become. But what Helena knows, now, is that Rachel has to do that on her own. Helena tried to help Rachel, and what has she done? Only made Rachel leave for longer and longer periods of time, come back with reddened eyes; only woken both of them up in the middle of the night with the sound of screaming.

But not for too much longer, now. Rachel says there are only a few more heads left on the hydra. Then it will be after this – and after this, Helena knows, she will come home. She will be a part of a family. Sarah will forgive her. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright. It will be alright.

(Right?)

14.

When Sarah opens the door to her apartment Helena has to bite her lip, very hard, because otherwise she will start crying and not be able to stop. Sarah looks exactly the same, her hair in waves around her shoulders, her brow furrowed. She is wearing a leather jacket, and Helena knows how it smells. Like coming home. Like dawn. Like the act of being reborn. Helena always knew Sarah would be the one to save her.

“Hello, _sestra_ ,” Helena says, words dry in her mouth. “I’m home.”

**Author's Note:**

> And we all know how to fake it baby  
> And we all know what we've done  
> We must be killers  
> Children of the wild ones  
> Killers  
> Where we got left to run?  
> Killer, killer, killer killer  
> Killer, killer, killer, killer  
> ~"We Must Be Killers," Mikky Ekko
> 
> Thank you for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed.


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